the table of the senior election, and tried to supplement their scanty fare with strange and mysterious concoctions, whose unsavory details have been handed down among the melancholy traditions of the past.
In 1847 a young brother of Lord Mansfield being very ill at school, his mother came to visit him. There was but one chair in the room, upon which the poor invalid was reclining; but his companion, seeing the dilemma, immediately arose, and with true boyish politeness offered Lady Mansfield the coal scuttle, on which he himself had been sitting. At Winchester, Sydney Smith suffered "many years of misery and starvation," while his younger brother, Courtenay, twice ran away, in the vain effort to escape his wretchedness. "There was never enough provided of even the coarsest food for the whole school," writes Lady Holland; "and the little boys were of course left to fare as well as they could. Even in his old age my father used to shudder at the recollections of Winchester, and I have heard him speak with horror of the misery of the years he spent there. The whole system, he affirmed, was one of abuse, neglect, and vice."
